In the field of high speed inkjet printing, it is desirable to be able to print across the width of the print media in a single pass of the print media past a print station. However, for many applications the desired print width exceeds the width of the available printheads. It is therefore necessary to arrange an array of printheads such that each printhead in the array prints a print swath, and the set of print swaths cover the desired print width. Such arrays of printheads are commonly configured in lineheads that include alignment hardware to maintain the desired relative alignment of the printheads, as well as fluid and electronic hardware to support the printheads within the linehead. As new applications are being developed for the use of high speed inkjet printing technology, such as the printing of labels, books, magazines, packaging materials, and décor (such as wallpaper, and laminate material for flooring and countertops), there is a need to develop an increasing number of lineheads to accommodate the increasing number of desired print widths.
To simplify the development of the various lineheads, it is desirable to employ a modular design approach for printhead alignment hardware and the supporting fluid and electronic hardware. In an exemplary configuration, each of the modules includes three printheads together with their supporting fluid and electrical hardware. By combining different numbers of modules together, lineheads of different sizes can be created.
Even though the printheads are assembled into modules within the lineheads, it is still desirable to be able to separately control and communicate each of the individual printheads within the linehead. There is also a need to be able to remove and replace individual printheads within the lineheads without shutting down the other printheads in the linehead. To achieve these goals, there is a need to automatically and adaptively assign communication addresses to facilitate communication of control signals and data with the various system components.